the number of removed files overflows an internal
buffer, a temporary file will be created on the receiving side to
hold the names (it is removed while open, so you shouldn’t see it
during the transfer). If the creation of the temporary file
fails, rsync will try to fall back to using --delete‐after (which
it cannot do if --recursive is doing an incremental scan). See
--delete (which is implied) for more details on file‐deletion.
--delete‐after
Request that the file‐deletions on the receiving side be done af‐
ter the transfer has completed. This is useful if you are send‐
ing new per‐directory merge files as a part of the transfer and
you want their exclusions to take effect for the delete phase of
the current transfer. It also forces rsync to use the old, non‐
incremental recursion algorithm that requires rsync to scan all
the files in the transfer into memory at once (see --recursive).
See --delete (which is implied) for more details on file‐dele‐
tion.
See also the --delete‐delay option that might be a faster choice
for those that just want the deletions to occur at the end of the
transfer.
--delete‐excluded
This option turns any unqualified exclude/include rules into
server‐side rules that do not affect the receiver’s deletions.
By default, an exclude or include has both a server‐side effect
(to "hide" and "show" files when building the server’s file list)
and a receiver‐side effect (to "protect" and "risk" files when
deletions are occurring). Any rule that has no modifier to spec‐
ify what sides it is executed on will be instead treated as if it
were a server‐side rule only, avoiding any "protect" effects of
the rules.
A rule can still apply to both sides even with this option speci‐
fied if the rule is given both the sender & receiver modifier
letters (e.g., -f’-sr foo’). Receiver‐side protect/risk rules
can also be explicitly specified to limit the deletions. This
saves you from having to edit a bunch of -f’- foo’ rules into
-f’-s foo’ (aka -f’H foo’) rules (not to mention the correspond‐
ing includes).
See the FILTER RULES section for more information. See --delete
(which is implied) for more details on deletion.
--ignore‐missing‐args
When rsync is first processing the explicitly requested source
files (e.g. command‐line arguments or --files‐from entries), it
is normally an error if the file cannot be found. This option
suppresses that error, and does not try to transfer the file.
This does not affect subsequent vanished‐file errors if a file
was initially found to be present and later is no longer there.
--delete‐missing‐args
This option takes the behavior of the (implied) --ignore‐missing‐
args option a step farther: each missing arg will become a dele‐
tion request of the corresponding destination file on the receiv‐
ing side (should it exist). If the destination file is a non‐
empty directory, it will only be successfully deleted if --force
or --delete are in effect. Other than that, this option is inde‐
pendent of any other type of delete processing.
The missing source files are represented by special file‐list en‐
tries which display as a "*missing" entry in the --list‐only out‐
put.